A fluid, fast paced animation about two ordinary people who have had enough.

In a way, it’s the culmination of things I learned over the last year, mingled with my existing interests and visual sensibilities. This was a completely different technique to anything I’d tried before, so I thought I might document the process a little.

Firstly, it was animated in Photoshop. Why would you want to do that, I hear you ask? Basically, because I wanted more natural linework and fluid movement. I knew I’d be working mostly frame-by-frame anyway, which is basically all photoshop is good for in terms of animation. I wanted it to have a natural, hand drawn feel, without the rigmarole of animating the whole thing on paper and filming it.

Secondly, I used a lot of rotoscoping and filmed reference. I hadn’t necessarily intended to from the start, but after filming and rotoscoping a test shot, I loved the way it looked and ran with it.

The other technique I tried was using heavily treated video backgrounds, which mostly came about through necessity and the stellar advice of Dr Chris Barker.

In my next post, you’ll see tasty treats from the film in my new showreel, which I’m working on now…

It’s a stream of consciousness style piece of hand drawn animation in which a briefcase changes hands and is taken on an unusual journey. All hand drawn animation, with hand painted backgrounds and an acapella soundtrack all done by yours truly.

The Manuscript from Sebastian Fowler on Vimeo.

Join us on Monday 16th of May from 6pm for the opening. Field Gallery, Level 3, RMIT Building 36, 393 Swanston St.

More details and documentation of each team losing their collective grip on reality at http://aimincamera.com/

This is what my classmates and I have been driving ourselves crazy over for the last few weeks. ‘An interactive journey through the mind’ made in the 3D realtime games engine Unity.

Being on the production team, I was tasked with making stuff. Since hardly any of us knew 3D, it was a steep learning curve with lots of swearing at computers, wild flailing, muttered threats and cries of anguish. We got there in the end though. Pablo, our team leader, showed exceptional patience with our bombardment of questions and freakouts. I know more about 3D than I ever thought I would, so that’s cool.

The other teams and everyone else involved did exceptional work too. It’s been a wild ride that’s brought us all closer together. The good kind of ‘closer’, not the ‘close enough to knee you in the crotch’ kind.

So I’m back to concentrating on my own stuff now. I’ll post some concept art for the new Thing I’m Working On soon, with some other random sketches.

On another note, I can’t believe I forgot to post the more finished version of my Picklet, Fribee Furor. Check it out. There are Dogs of War in it.

Sound_motion_brief.doc

More recently, Stewart brought in Melbourne comics artist Ben Hutchings to give us a demo of what he’s been working on with Picklets. It’s going to be one of the flagship picklets and it’s awesome. If you check out his site (link above), you’ll see some shots of his work in progress. Imagine it in motion. Glorious.

Now, I’m in the midst of my own. I’ll post the full thing when I’m done, but it’s silly little idea about dogs chasing frisbees that gets a bit out of control. Here be some dogs for ye to gawk at:

The workflow, once you’ve got everything set up, is pretty simple. You don’t need to know anything about coding or app building. All you need is a google account, dropbox with a public folder set up, and some Photoshop skills. Instructions and the all important script over at the Picklet Builder.

You download a script for Photoshop, which you run to set up your picklet template. Once you’ve got all your artwork into the template, you run the same script again to export it to your dropbox. Jump into Chrome and sign into the Picklet Builder using your google account, then start fiddling and making things move. You can even save drafts which you can send to people.

More on this later, when it’s closer to completion. For now, I’ve got backgrounds to draw.

So here’s a little ditty that I whipped up the other day titled NeedleBoy in Grooveland. It’s actually the second storyboard I’ve done this year, but I’m not the owner of the source material for that one. It’s more technically complex, took me ages to draw and was a bit of bitch, so I wish I could show it. There was a full band with a horn section, dancing party people, a desert island and more. But enough taunting with untouchable treats, on to something I can show!

This one’s basically a little story I came up with about a little robot needle dude who gets dropped into the groove of records and acts out the music with different parts of his anatomy. Legs bounce as the bass line, forearms act as the guitar strings, speaker bits as drums, mouth for vocals, etc. The poor little guy gets stuck and starts skipping, he takes control of the situation, then other things take control of him. It’s all very emotional. Anyway, here’s the storyboard.

NeedleBoy Storyboard SF

And while I’m at it, here’s the original concept sketch for NeedleBoy in Grooveland:

I found the storyboarding process not too difficult, probably because of my years of (thinking about) making comics and reading tons of comics. Plus I love drawing and expressing ideas visually comes pretty  naturally.

Yes, Needleboy will be a bitch to animate, but I’d like to make him into an animation at some point.

Here’s a very brief run-down of the process: Set Alchemy to automatically record what’s on the page to a pdf every 5 seconds. Torture photoshop by making it import hundreds of pages of pdf to individual images and spit them back out again at chosen screen res. Use Quicktime pro to convert image sequence to video. Chop it up and play with the timing in Final cut.

I’ve been using Alchemy for a little while for various things. It’s basically very good for quickly generating ideas and forms, playing around with quickly creating images that you can then play around with in other programs and fine tune.

Alchemy has no undo/redo, no layers, etc. It has a range of interesting tools to play around with image creation & manipulation; mirroring, using pressure, random colour changes, distortion, controlling the line weight with mic input. Part of it’s beauty is the way it can save and export to various formats.

I’ve used it to create interesting backgrounds, which I then used in photoshop. I’ve played around generating random shapes, which I would try to find form and character in to base ideas off. Here’s one of the more clear examples:

The bottom images is character hand drawn & inked based on forms glimpsed in Alchemy creations.

So basically, have fun, experiment and play.

One of these days, I’ll get around to scanning & posting some more recent drawings, particularly of the last Dr Sketchy’s and I’m sure I’ve got some fiction and story ideas lying around that might be of interest to someone.

So here’s my response to the Agents + Behaviours brief we were give a few weeks back. This was basically me trying to do some expressive character animation.

Voiced by the lovely and talented Joana Pires (and myself). You’ll notice that I went with a variation on one of the character in my concept sketches in my last post.

While I did have fun in the end with this, it was an incredibly painful process to begin with. Firstly I struggled to settle on an idea and method of production, torturing myself over various approaches. I settled on one, did a lot of drawing and tests, which turned out awful and I ditched them completely.

While I had planned to do a lot of this hand drawn, I ended up producing it entirely in Flash, with tons of hand drawn roughs and thumbnails to figure out the motion. The backgrounds I painted in watercolour. I would have liked to work on the soundtrack more and played a little with lighting and effects, but there you have it.

Also, I had a lot of fun drawing the disapproving hobo in a dress. K, time for sleep now. Next up, my Alchemy animation…